A Classroom-Based Study of CyberGuardian: An Educational Game for Learning Cryptographic Primitives

To make cybersecurity concepts more accessible to non-technical students, we present our classroom-based study of CyberGuardian, an educational game designed to teach cryptographic primitives through simplified, real-world scenarios. Players assume the role of a cybersecurity advisor, providing guidance to simulated clients and analyzing authentic messages to assure confidentiality, data integrity, and authentication through three cryptographic primitives: symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption, and digital signature. CyberGuardian is freely available, easy to deploy at scale, and implemented as a single-player offline game compatible with macOS and Windows. Our learning objectives are to enable students to: (1) Identify how an adversary can interfere with communications; (2) Explain how cryptographic primitives can mitigate dangers; and (3) Apply cryptographic primitives to reduce vulnerabilities.